black friday

Today, at an event in New York, GE announced that it will open up “thousands” of patents from its library of some 20,000 to inventors using Quirky’s crowdsourced product development platform. That means that if you’re bright enough, you can use a GE patent to invent something. GE will still collect royalties on your brain power, but they promise not to sue you.

Quirky, for those of you unfamiliar, is an online social platform that people use to develop relatively simple products with the help of others, and bring them all the way to retail. In general, the products that make it all the way through the platform’s gauntlet of development stages are simple little gadgets that make your life better but don’t exist. GE is, well, you know what GE is.

Starting next month, GE will being rolling out patents and make them available through a searchable online database. Initially, the “Inspiration Platform” will launch with a few hundred patents and eventually ramp up to several thousand. Quirky says it plans to have some products available in time for Black Friday.

The two companies announced some crazy sounding tech like “optical systems,” “barrier coatings,” and “Telematics and asset tracking technology” that will be available, but the whole list of usable knowledge isn’t yet available. Even if all the patents aren’t that exciting, opening up knowledge is always a good thing. Now, it’s up to you to do something with it. [Quirky]

Smartphones and tablets continue to drive an increasing share of e-commerce traffic.

According to Monetate, mobile accounted for 18 percent of e-commerce traffic in the third quarter, up from 8 percent a year prior.

Smartphones drove a larger share of traffic than tablets, which reflects their increased penetration and perhaps the popularity of “showrooming,” when consumers use their smartphone in-store to compare prices.

Retailers, both online and brick-and-mortar, have to heed consumers’ changing shopping habits. According to IBM, mobile accounted for 16 percent of Black Friday online sales this year, up from 9.8 percent a year ago.

The average Black Friday online shopper bought 5.6 items per order. That’s down 13% from last year. It’s also down 40% from Friday, November 16th, a week earlier. Hard to know what to make of that.

The average shopping “session” length was 6 minutes and 39 seconds. That’s down about 10% from last year. Compare that to the average hellish shopping session in a physical store, and you’ll see why ecommerce is continuing to grow as a percent over overall retail sales.

The “conversion rate” of online shoppers–the percentage of those who visited the site who actually bought something–was 4.58%. That’s up 9% from last year.

Mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) accounted for 16% of sales. That’s up from 10% last year.

Mobile devices accounted for 24% of site traffic. That’s up from 14% last year.

iPads accounted for 10% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.

iPhones accounted for 9% of site traffic, up from 5% last year.

Android phones and tablets accounted for 5.5% of site traffic, up from 4% last year.

The key observations here would seem to be:

Mobile is ! continui ng to grow rapidly as a percentage of traffic and sales, but it’s not taking over by any means. 6 years into the smartphone era, with smartphones now accounting for more than 55% of U.S. handsets, traffic to mobile sites (including traffic from tablets) is still less than 25% of overall traffic.

Apple devices continue to crush Android devices in terms of commerce engagement. Android users just don’t seem to do all that much with their gadgets.

And now to social referrals…

It wasn’t long ago that many people were arguing that Facebook was eventually going to be bigger than Google. Word of mouth, after all, is the most powerful form of marketing known to man. And people lived on Facebook, so they would soon be shopping on Facebook. And so forth.

Well, so far, anyway, that ain’t happening.

Only 0.68% of Black Friday online sales came from Facebook referrals–two-thirds of one percent. That was a decline of 1% from last year.

And how about Twitter?

A couple of years ago, people were excited about Twitter’s potential as a commerce platform, too.

But Twitter’s impact on ecommerce, it seems, is zero.

Not “basically zero.”

Zero.

Commerce site traffic from Twitter accounted for exactly 0.00% of Black Friday traffic. That was down from 0.02% last year.

So much for the idea that Twitter or Facebook’s business models are going to have much to do with commerce.

“You get the item quickly, you don’t pay for shipping, you often receive better prices, and you don’t have to leave your house,” said Andrew Schrage, founder of Money Crashers.

Perhaps in response to shoppers like Schrage, businesses have been giving away free shipping with a vengeance.

Some 93 percent of stores will offer at least one free shipping deal this year, which means a six percent increase from last year. Meanwhile 30 percent of store sites will offer free shipping on Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation.

Experts like Kit Yarrow, a professor of psychology and marketing at Golden Gate University in San Francisco, Calif., told Smart Money that free shipping has become an expectation. However, things don’t always don’t always pan out for consumers.

Retailers may raise the price of their products to make up for shipping costs or bar consumers from using coupons. She also warns shoppers to consider the overall package, including whether or not you can combine discounts.

Believe it or not, that’s what the latest data shows: The economy is bouncing back, or at least, retail spending is. The trend is clear especially in electronics, where spending has skyrocketed from a little above $160 to almost $190.

That figure is the average spending per user, post-Black friday. The main winners were Best Buy—with a 18.3% year-over-year growth—and Fry’s—with a 12.2%. No only that but, spending in the high end retail has also increased, reverting a negative trend.

Great. Now all those people without a single penny in the bank will be able to be rejoice. [Mint]

this is on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets in New York City.

In thinking about retail … this helps illustrate the tremendous challenges they face.

– online switching costs are pretty much zero — just type another URL; these two stores are physically touching — just walk next door

– they carry much of the same inventory from plasma TVs to computers to home stereo equipment to software, CDs, DVDs, etc.

– they both sell Apple iPods; consumers have already decided to buy an iPod for Christmas (for some reason), which store do they walk into? what differentiates the store with the blue awning from the one with silver letters? they both have “black friday” discounts but the price ended up to be about $1 from each other; both have geeks on staff, one called Geek Squad and the other Fire Dog

– and then there’s Amazon.com which is tax free and offers free 2nd day shipping.

THIS is a challenging marketing problem for retailers such as the ones pictured!

Digital Consigliere

Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights.